There is an ever-increasing need to automatically organize and manage ad hoc communications networks and obtain more bandwidth and/or better utilization of existing bandwidth for those networks, and for higher throughput. Even a basic discussion, however, of the numerous types of communications networks and protocols would occupy pages of material. Therefore, in order not to burden the knowledgeable reader with a discussion of the prior art, and in order to allow the reader to focus on the present invention, the prior art communications networks are not discussed in this background. Suffice it to say that the various prior art communications networks suffer from one or more problems, including failure to provide equal opportunity to transmit for all stations, failure to realistically provide for near-optimization of the transmission authority sequence, and failure to provide for adding and dropping stations without disrupting the network. For the interested reader, a detailed description of the operation and deficiencies of known prior art networks is provided in Appendix A, which is attached hereto, all of which is incorporated herein by reference as if fully set forth at this point in this Background.